So this happened: I got asked to help train a team of 25 bright, ambitious, clever & talented people from Jiangsu Broadcasting. I believe they are headquartered in Nanjing, and they were set loose in Los Angeles for 20 days (missing out on some big & important holidays in China) to learn what they could […] [...more]

So this happened: I got asked to help train a team of 25 bright, ambitious, clever & talented people from Jiangsu Broadcasting. I believe they are headquartered in Nanjing, and they were set loose in Los Angeles for 20 days (missing out on some big & important holidays in China) to learn what they could about how to adapt to the shift from traditional broadcast TV, to a more multiplatform approach.

Here’s a gallery of images from the last day, when they had to present their projects.

Yeah, I read the caption to this too – “loser … instantly … falling into a pit…” and realized that China’s gameshows are totally badass.

Here are the contestants, perched on their precarious peninsulas (see what I did there?), waiting to have questions fired at them by the stern hosts.

The students partied it up while they were in L.A., and experimented with Vine to post pictures of themselves toasting their success with California wine.

As part of their presentation, one of the teams of students built sequences into their Prezi, where they took the letters U-S-C and used them to talk about how much they enjoyed their time in L.A. They were particularly impressed by the cheerleaders at our football matches.

I think this spells out “M V” — maybe they saw the old Village People “YMCA” hand gestures, and figured they’d one-up it?

So my students think I’m “Sully” from Monsters, Inc. Large, hairy, kinda goofy, by generally friendly and harmless. I guess this represents progress of a sort – usually, my students call me Hagrid.

They were challenged to think strategically about how best to incorporate social media into their marketing and programming mix.

Contestants on the singing contest show “The Hidden King” put on masks and perform against each other. Some of the masks really get ornate.

One of the other ways that the students considered to drive traffic, awareness and interactivity with their content, is to start using the gossip sites to send out photos of Chinese celebrities making fashion faux pas. Zippers undone, bad armpit hair-shaving, etc. Somewhere, Perez Hilton nods and murmurs appreciatively.

They’ve gotten the message that to compete against the market leader – a spinoff of “The Voice” – they are going to have to use a mix of social media strategies to try to build up a more engaged audience.

Unable to built a real high-quality mask of their own, the students resorted to sticking post-it notes to the foreheads of their singer. I gave them extra points for resourcefulness and creativity. And, of course, silliness.

The promos for “The Hidden King” would not look out of place in a Thor movie. Some huge guy, dreadful, menacing music … swinging a hammer with a glowing symbol in it … if it was a movie, I definitely would go see it.

UPDATE: The first video below was erroneously a duplicate of video #3. I blame the shoddy connection I had – I am thrilled that the videos made it up to YouTube at all, frankly, and it took me an hour and several tried to get this post to publish, so I had some version-control issues. […] [...more]

UPDATE: The first video below was erroneously a duplicate of video #3. I blame the shoddy connection I had – I am thrilled that the videos made it up to YouTube at all, frankly, and it took me an hour and several tried to get this post to publish, so I had some version-control issues. Anyway, I’ve fixed it so that vid #1 is now the proper first part, in which we talk about the persistent power of radio.

The more I learn about how the media operates in East Africa, the more I think this is going to be a fascinating area to watch over the next few years. The conditions here are ripe for some really interesting changes – we are going to see in this microcosm what the effects are of empowering a population that is still stuck with only one-way information flow (largely via radio – please see video #1, below) to suddenly leapfrog into the ubiquitous mobile web-fueled connectivity that we see in places like Japan, Korea and (to an extent) China.

BACKGROUND: A couple of weeks ago, I had a meeting with the CEO of Fana Broadcasting. At that time, I was told that the plan was to install 4G mobile connectivity throughout the country. I have since learned that the contract looks like it is going to be awarded to a giant Chinese telecom company. This is not necessarily good news. The suspicion among the journalists is that the infrastructure contract has been given to the Chinese because they have pledged to include many of the down-and-dirty spyware and censorship features that are common to the internet behind the Great Firewall of China. Also: it is rumored that the Chinese outbid US and European companies for this huge contract, because the government of China is (illegally?) subsidizing the work, secretly funneling money under the table to the ostensibly private-sector telecom company, to allow it to do billions of dollars of work for 1/20th the price. Conspiracy theories abound here; in the absence of any hard facts or verification, people always assume the worst.

At any rate: the plan is to wire up all the major cities and towns with 4G wireless internet service. One of the big reasons expressed for that is that the Powers that Be have noticed that on just about every roof, you can see a satellite dish. Those dishes are bringing news, information and TV programs into households from TV providers outside of Ethiopia. They want to jump-start their own domestic news and entertainment industry, to start to produce high-quality content, to lure audience away from these international sources. Part of this is to foster a sense of national unity: to expose Ethiopians to news, movies and TV series that star Ethiopians, speaking Amharic, and referring to matters that are of concern to Ethiopians (and eventually, to citizens of the surrounding countries, none of which really has their own video/web content production infrastructure). Part of it is to start building up the kind of media-production capabilities that might allow Ethiopia to start exporting its culture to the international marketplace; from what I have seen here, there is certainly an opportunity for the kind of smart, dedicated artists here to start changing the international perception of this place, which is still stuck in the famine years.

Anyway, in the first part of the interviews I did with Samson Tesfaye, for his show “Movers and Shakers” on AfroFM, we talk about what things are like in the present day – where the vast majority of the rural populations in Ethiopia still rely on what they hear over the radio as their main (perhaps only) source of news and information.

The next part of the interview, we focus on the impact of social media in East Africa. At this time, Sami says that social media is not having the kind of disruptive effects we see in North Africa, where the Arab Spring is still very much alive and kicking, or to the south in Kenya, where the technology scene is vibrant and lively.